Every political order and every social system is the reflection of a cosmology. It may be that the connection is remote and attenuated, that cosmological and mythological forms are mixed and confused. But political and social orders are always heirs of cosmologies and their supporting and explanatory mythic structures. The myths of hierarchy, Constantinos A. Patrides has demonstrated, “continued to exercise a profound influence on diverse thinkers as late as the eighteenth century.”1Hierarchical social and political structures based ultimately on these mythic formulations were not broken until the revolution in France in 1789 and the slow demise of the old order which followed in its wake.

When, at the turn of the fifth century into the sixth of the Christian era, pseudoDionysius the Areopagite wrote De coelestia hierarchia, he was drawing on cosmological and mythological traditions already millennia old.

Cosmic order and hierarchical structure are complementary. Nowhere is this more manifest than in the “great chain of being.” Conceptions such as higher and lower, center, ascent and descent, boundaries of every kind, degree and order all have a hierarchical component. To perceive the world as an ordered cosmos is to perceive it in hierarchical terms. Notions such as purity and perfection, clean and unclean, imply boundaries and speciation2 and also imply an order of nearly infinite gradation.

Georges Duby in his book, The Three Orders, Feudal Society Imagined, 3 has pointed to the importance of these conceptions to the medieval worldview:

Central was the assumption of a coherence between heaven and earth, two parts of one homogeneous world, built to a single plan and hence reciprocally related, yet based on a principle of inequality inherent in hierarchy, in which the superior serves as a model for the inferior. . . .

That heaven, earth and mankind are one continuum and subject to the same order and degree is one of the oldest and most persistent ideas in human history. As the comparative study of archaic Indo-European Society by Georges Dumézil has demonstrated, mythic content and social structure from Iran to Ireland show marked likenesses.4

Although the findings of Dumézil have been criticized and disputed, the bulk of the evidence which he offers seems to demonstrate that cosmology had its analogies in body structure and social function. Topography was reflected in physiology and hierarchical social structure. One need not accept a “functionalist,” Durkheimian interpretation of these facts in order to admit the pervasiveness of this Indo-European ideology. It is more likely that social facts are derivative from religious facts than the other way around and, indeed, the religious fact often exists in the absence of a social function.

How deeply the theological penetrated the social, functional world, providing interpretative meaning and structure, is made clear in the study of medieval kingship. Nowhere is this more dramatically borne out than in the Athanasian conception of “the King’s two bodies.”5 Here it is apparent that theology precedes and makes possible the political-social formulation. It should not be a matter for surprise then that structural conceptions of social reality are derived from the oldest and deepest cosmological-mythical ideologies of modern man. It should be emphasized, moreover, that the experience of the Indo-Europeans may not be unique and that their ideology may be a “common concomitant of the human condition.”6 The evidence of sociobiology would seem to point in this direction.

The key to Dumézil’s analysis of Indo-European ideology is the conception of “trifunctionality.” This conception is not only mythical but linguistic as well, for Western rhetoric follows a tripartite pattern of exposition and argumentation. The personality of the King embraces in an undifferentiated whole the “trifunctionality” of society. He is sacred and assures the order of society. He is a warrior and preserves the society from disorder and intrusion and he secures the fecundity and material plenty of the society. When these functions are differentiated and located in specific persons and castes society is seen to consist of priests, warriors and peasants. Moreover, this social structure is hierarchically ordered and its pattern follows the hierarchical pattern of physiology, topography and cosmology. Priests, warriors and peasants are descending orders of worthiness and purity. The well-ordered society depends upon the proper articulation of social function. Order depends ultimately upon the recognition of degree.

When, in the revolutionary changes which characterized eleventh-century Europe, trifunctionalism or “ternarity” became the ideology of feudal society the division into groups was “not on the basis of actions performed, roles played, offices assumed, or services mutually rendered, but rather on the basis of merit.”7 Moreover, this conception of order was radically different from that of the Gelasian formula. Differentiation was not on the basis of the bearing of arms but rather in the indulgence of sexuality. The articulation of this vision of order was to be found in the works of pseudoDionysius the Areopagite: On the Celestial Hierarchy and On Ecclesiastical Hierarchy. In short, the ideology preceded, anticipated and provided a vocabulary for the functional needs of the society.

It is well to be reminded that a thousand years of human history is an exceedingly long while. The period from the coronation of Charlemagne in 800 to the coronation of Napoleon in 1804 is such a millennium. At the beginning and at the end of this period stand major revolutions both ideological and sociopolitical. The millennium begins with the crystalization of Europe and concludes with the onset of its dissolution. The history of Europe begins with order, hierarchy, degree and status and draws to a close with the proclamation of revolutionary equality. For a thousand years the Indo-European ideology of trifunctionalism held sway.

Charlemagne was the first to give Europe an identity. His achievement was fragile and tenuous and was nearly destroyed by forces of entropy, the Norse invasions and the increasing barbarization and corruption of secular and ecclesiastical society. Neither the distinctive forms of the Medieval Church nor those of Feudalism had yet emerged. By the eleventh century they had come into existence. The two centuries from 800 to 1,000 were decisive for the development of Europe. The growth of population and the increase in material resources was steady throughout the period. Nonetheless, the opening of the eleventh century was a period of great instability and disorder. The decay of kingship and papacy, and reform movements in both the Church and society evidence this growing disorder. The turn of the millennium occasioned widespread apocalyptic anticipations.8 Heretical movements appeared everywhere. It is in this atmosphere of change, disorder, pessimism and new and growing intellectual and material resources that the distinctive political and spiritual institutions of Europe take form.

Both restoration and innovation are characteristic of the eleventh century. Already in 888 with the death of Charles the Fat the Carolingian Empire came to an end. Although the Frankish empire fell apart the notion of Universal empire did not die. The dream of a sacred temporal order persisted. When the Saxon house achieved ascendency in Germany in the course of the tenth century, repulsing the barbarians, defending the papacy and establishing its kingship in Italy much in the fashion of Charlemagne, it was natural to attach the imperial title to the Ottomans. Though reestablished, the Empire was always in jeopardy; imperial theory always more satisfactory than the reality. In the Empire, the Papacy, the Cluniac monks, the crusading movement, the spiritualization of knighthood, and the sanctification of marriage, 9 the force of spiritual ideas, proved more powerful than the forces of disorder. In this transformation of society the ideas of sacred order, trifunctionalism and hierarchy played a most important role. It is unfortunate that Duby’s analysis of the influence of trifuctionalism in the development of manorialism and feudalism lapses into the clichés of Marxism; the mode of production, class conflict and exploitation and the legitimation of privilege.10 There is a law of parsimony in historical explanation as well as in natural scientific explanation and one need not go beyond the eleventh century perception of disorder and the “rage for order” to the mode of production in order to provide an explanation for the rise of feudalism. Feudalism was, as Joseph Strayer and Rushton Coulborn long ago pointed out, a political and not an economic institution.11 It was the response of an afflicted society, racked by internal disorder and external threat, seeking an order and stability which, under the circumstances, could be achieved only at the local level. There were, indeed, overarching political and religious ideals and there was a constant effort to rationalize and humanize the system through the sacralization of its institutions. The sacred mode was still the only theoretical basis for human action. Order was perceived to be absolutely dependent upon hierarchy. It was dependent upon order and hierarchy because the order which the gods or God had created was one of degree and levels of perfection.12 The archaic model for all human action is the action of the gods.

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The Rise of the Individual

The medieval period is not, as many of us have come to think, an easily defined and categorized period. It was, in fact, a period whose social structure showed great diversity and differentiation. Gradations of status were very nearly infinite while levels of consumption show less variation and gradation than do those in our presumably more “equalitarian” contemporary society. The fact as well as the theory of medieval society was hierarchical and based upon inequalities of status and privilege. Heaven and the angelic host were hierarchically ordered. All creation bore the mark of grades of perfection and St. Thomas observed that even had Adam and Eve not sinned, ordered life in Paradise would have required status and degree. It is no less true that the basic postulates of Christian theology and medieval social theory contain impulses to equalitarianism. These are always in tension with the hierarchical and inequalitarian tendencies in Christianity and medieval society. How these claims to equality might be adjusted to the claims of hierarchy is a matter of important discussion and debate through the thousand year medieval era. Out of this discussion developed the definitions of “commutative” and “distributive” justice which have, down to the present, dominated Catholic conceptions of social justice. These distinctions must be taken seriously in any extended discussion of equality in the contemporary world simply because of the tremendous impact of Catholic social teaching in Europe and America.

Justice, in Catholic as in Platonic terms, is rendering to each man that which is his due. It is a science of mutuality in which all men have rights and claims and all men have duties and obligations. Theories of justice therefore describe these mutual relationships, and at the heart of these theories are notions of both hierarchy and equality.

“Commutative justice” determines the relationships between persons equal in dignity. All men are equal in certain respects; i.e. equality before God. They are however unequal in certain respects; i.e. unequal by nature and in the grace, talents and powers distributed by God. Both benefits and obligations follow from these gifts and inequalities. In an important sense, Catholic political theory is hierarchical and monarchic. It insists that rewards be appropriate to the demands and burdens made upon the individual. Catholic social theory looks beyond the welfare of the individual to the welfare of the corporate body and the society as a whole. The corporatism of St. Paul is reinforced by the corporatism of the Stoics. The head exists for the body rather than the body existing for the head. But beyond Paul and the Stoics was the corporate practice of traditional society strengthening and undergirding the sanctions of religion and philosophy.

Jacob Burckhardt’s lines in the chapter, “The Development of the Individual,” in his book, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, 13 are familiar to almost everyone:

In the Middle Ages both sides of human consciousness—that which was turned within as that which was turned without—lay dreaming or half awake beneath a common veil. The veil was woven of faith, illusion, and childish prepossession, through which the world and history were seen clad in strange hues. Man was conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family, or corporation—only through some general category. In Italy this veil first melted into air; an objective treatment and consideration of the state and of all things of this world became possible. The subjective side at the same time asserted itself with corresponding emphasis; man became a spiritual individual, recognizing himself as such. . . .

Today scholarship would place the development of individualism and the decay of the corporatism of traditionalism in the medieval era rather than at the onset of the Renaissance.14 Indeed, the development of individualism is contemporary with those other major developments of the eleventh century about which we have spoken.

The development of individualism is important to the growth of the notion of equality in both a negative and a positive sense. The corporatist theories of traditional society, Christian theology and natural law philosophy had, in spite of their hierarchical structure, a strong equalitarian bias. Social theory was based upon a conception of “the common good” and a society which was functionally ordered perceived all three functions as equally necessary for the preservation of the society. Thus, the head is not more important than the hand.

However, the growth of individualism with its strong emphasis upon equality of claims (as in marriage), and its denial of hereditary status was essential to the development of the idea of equality. Tocqueville saw these claims to equality as the distinctive characteristic of modern democratic society and it goes almost without saying that these claims to equality were the most powerful solvents to the patterns of traditional society. Individualism always insists that the claims of the individual take priority over the claims of the society. Corporate social theory insists that the ruler and the rich man are the servants of the community and that each bears a burden of obligation to the community.

Christian theory as well as Germanic tribal practice had expressed their equalitarian tendencies in the form of elective magistracies. Both the office of the Emperor and that of the Pope were elective. Moreover, the office of bishop generally was an elective office. These tendencies were so powerful that universal consensus is the test not only of political legitimacy but also of orthodoxy and legality. Little wonder that Lord Acton described St. Thomas Aquinas as “the first Whig.” Even so, the theoretical justification of democratically derived magistracies was unclear. Here again equalitarian principles were in conflict with hierarchical structures.

Walter Ullmann sees this ambiguity in terms of two contrasting theories of government, both operative in the Middle Ages, “though at one time the one, at other times the other. . . .”15 Ullmann argues that one theory of government and law, in time of origin the earlier one, may be described as the “ascending theory.” It asserts that original power is located in the people or the community; vox populi vox Dei. Religious ministers and kings derived their powers ultimately from the people and were accountable to them. As a consequence magistrates were accountable to a popular assembly and the people retained a right to resist what was perceived to be unjust. Power was conceived as ascending from a broad base to the apex. It is this “populist” theory of legitimacy, orthodoxy and power which is at the heart of Western constitutional development.

Hierarchical theories of government express an opposite or “descending” theory of power. Original and supreme power is located in divinity. This Pauline conception of political power is reinforced by St. Augustine in the fifth century. All power is derivative and descends from above. It is, in fact, sacral in character and popes and kings are God’s vice-regents on earth. Such power as the “people” possess is derivative and given from above. The magistrates are not elected from below but appointed from above. This hierarchical principle is theocratic and it has the effect of making the king a high priest.

Ullmann points out that the history of political theory in the Middle Ages is a history of conflict between these two theories of government. Underlying theories of government are assumptions concerning the equality or the inequality of mankind. Of course the two theories overlapped and interpenetrated in practice. In theory any male Christian, regardless of birth or whether or not he was in holy orders, might be elected Pope. One can hardly be more democratic than that. Moreover, the ultimate test of orthodoxy insofar as doctrine was concerned was universal consensus. When Savigny, the founder of historical jurisprudence in the early nineteenth century, wrote “Statute cannot enforce what custom does not decree,” he was simply echoing the populist legal theory of the Middle Ages.

It is directly out of these medieval conceptions of popular sovereignty that the constitutional democracy of the United States developed. The relationship of equality or an essential equality is not far to seek, for without the fiction of equality popular sovereignty would not be a tenable theory or practice.

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Natural Right or Common Good?

These observations bring to the surface issues which are of considerable interest and importance. In the medieval period and down to modern times popular sovereignty was seen as a corporate rather than an individual manifestation. Ultimate power resided not in the individual but in the community, the popular assembly, “the people,” rather than in the individual. Corporate rights there were indeed but individual rights were as yet unclear and undefined. Until these communal rights became individual rights one could not speak of equality in any meaningful sense even though the bias of medieval “upward” theory was equalitarian. It is precisely this development from communal to the individual rights which was to be the great work of the Reformation and religious non-conformity.

An important question arises with respect to the development of the idea of equality. To what extent is the idea of equality dependent upon strong and well-developed individual rights? It is ordinarily assumed that the maximum of equalitarianism exists in collectivized societies rather than in liberal societies characterized by widespread individualism and even considerable differences in wealth. Is it possible that while there is no contradiction between communalism and corporatism and equality, in fact, equality does not flourish under such circumstances? Intensely differentiated individual rights, clearly defined and distinguished from those of community and possessed by all alike; surely that is the very heart of any theory of equality. Can, in fact, do such conditions prevail in societies which are organized on an almost exclusively corporate basis?

One should never forget [Ullmann writes],that the principle of equality is of fairly recent date; in other words, that the members of society had, by virtue of being members of society, equality of standing within the public field was not a doctrine that was known to the high Middle Ages. . . . 16

Nonetheless, this descending theory of authority and power insisted on the eternal and inviolable character of the law; a law which was no respecter of persons, and when individual rights came to be enshrined in this law they gained a power and a permanence which they would not have otherwise possessed.

Moreover, the “ascending” theory of government had important implications for the development of individualism. The village community precisely because it was so low and, for the most part, so far removed from the grand concerns of power, was able to conduct its business with little interference by those in authority over them. Ullmann says:

I have no hesitation in saying that it was the reality of transacting public business—if I may use so great a name for quite primitive activities—by the lower reaches of the community which, in conjunction with the feudal form of government, was to provide some secure foundation for the later emergence of the doctrine of the individual as a full grown citizen. . . . 17
These self-governing bodies were exemplifications of an important viewpoint; “the idea of equality, the idea that they as members of the community were equals. . . .”18

While the theory of feudalism was hierarchic and assumed an order imposed from above, in practice it was a relationship of mutuality based upon contractual relationships and over the long run these moved society in the direction of a conception of individual rights. The rule of law and notions of due process while not inherently equalitarian in their bias exercised an influence which strengthened the development of a conception of individual rights.

This strongly pronounced equalizing effect of the feudal law—not in a social, but in a legal sense—accounts for the often observed popular features of the early growing common law, which indeed incorporated the consent of those to whom it applied, even if this consent was assuredly one of construction. . . . 19

The crisis of the eleventh century passed, if indeed it can be called a crisis and not simply viewed as an evidence of growth development. What has been called the twelfth-century Renaissance was surely only the consequence of increasing order, rationality, legality and economic growth of the eleventh century. The barbarians were pressed back and converted, Islam was held in check, population reached levels which were not surpassed until the agricultural revolution of the eighteenth century, cities once more flourished and Europe put on its white garment of great churches. A technological revolution of great importance transformed agriculture and warfare and made smithing and milling commonplace enterprises. Above all, changes in the intellectual climate of Europe made possible a new and coherent understanding of man’s place in the world and the nature of society and politics.

By the middle of the eleventh century apocalyptic expectations based upon the millennium of the passion had been disappointed. The world endured and, indeed, the millennial theory of emiseration gave way to modest optimism. At the center of these developments is a growing sense of human individuality and as Ullmann has pointed out, “the rebirth of national man, of the mere homo who had been hibernating under the surface for so many centuries, entailed the rebirth of the citizen in the public sphere.20

By the twelfth century European society had outgrown the political theory it had derived from Augustine which saw government as a temporary arrangement of little consequence, the result of sin, a way station on the road of apocalyptic transformation. Inequality and injustice were, in terms of this theory, the natural condition of fallen man. Not only had European thought outgrown the political theory of Augustine, but the whole question of the relationship of reason to revelation, and nature to grace, had reached a crisis point.

Two factors were of great importance in the elaboration of a new and definitive “humanism.” These were the enormous expansion of philosophical study and debate and the translation, from Arabic and Hebrew sources, of Aristotle into Latin.21 Aristotle’s Metaphysics and De Anima were translated about 1200 and gradually the Aristotelian corpus became available in the West. Out of the philosophical debate surrounding the reception of Aristotle arises a new conception of man, nature and the state which was to have a profound impact on the growth of individualism and the notion of equality. St. Thomas Aquinas (1224–74) is said to have “baptized” Aristotle and made him acceptable to Christian philosophy. What Thomas baptized was the natural man, human nature. It is not an idealized nature such as the Stoics invented nor was it a nature which had been totally corrupted by the primal fall. It was a nature to be overcome and transcended but a nature which served as the basis of earthly life; a nature which was perfected by grace.

This accomodation of Aristotelianism to Christian philosophy perfected Aristotelianism even as grace perfected nature. The philosophy of Aristotle as it was filtered through the commentaries of Averroes and influenced the students of Roman Law, pointed in the direction of a radically new notion of the state as the consummate work of human reason and an arena in which mankind could perfect itself.22 “Political Averroism,” it has been argued, was the intellectual ancestor of ideological totalitarianism. The notion of the state as a perfected order was as foreign to St. Thomas as was Augustine’s absolute otherworldliness which assumed that history was the story of two cities in which the governments of man, tarnished by sin and failure, were destined to be overcome by the power of God and His saints.

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The Achievement of Thomas Aquinas

For Thomas, political and social institutions have a positive value which is grounded in the nature of man. While that nature, unassisted, cannot lead to salvation there is a sphere of ethical and political activity in the state which will lead to the fulfillment of the natural man. We can know what this order, this natural law is through rational analysis and we can be assured that this natural political order, this natural law is a part of the eternal law of God. It is only within this natural order, only in terms of the natural man that the individual can be perfected. Gratia non tollit naturam sed perficit; Grace does not abolish nature but perfects it. Furthermore, as St. Thomas argues in his Commentary on the Politics of Aristotle there is a science through which we can know those things proper to the good of the city. These are not sufficient to salvation but necessary to the natural good of everyman.

We can judge the distinctive character of St. Thomas’s thought in his treatment of slavery. Both the impulse of Christianity and the changing structure of economics and society were important to the abandonment of slavery in the course of the Middle Ages. While slavery was not unknown in Western Europe during the Middle Ages and was thought to be one of the consequences of sin and the primal fall, attitudes toward it were filled with conflict and ambiguity.23

St. Thomas in the Summa Theologiae, Q. 96, Art. 4, writes:

Lordship may be taken in two senses: either as the opposite of slavery and then a lord is he to whom another is subject as a slave. In a more general way lordship indicates any man who has the office of ruling and directing freemen. In the state of innocence man could have been a master of men, not in the former, but in the latter sense. This distinction is founded on the reason that a slave differs from a free man in that, as Aristotle says at the beginning of the Metaphysics, the freeman exists for himself whereas the slave exists for another person. A slave-holder is one who assigns the slave completely to his own use and benefit. And since every man’s proper good is one desirable to himself, and consequently it is a grievous matter to yield to any one what ought to be one’s own, therefore such dominion implies of necessity a pain inflicted on the subject; and consequently in the state of innocence such a mastership would not have existed between man and man.24

So far then as man’s state before the fall was concerned, according to St. Thomas, there was no slavery. Slavery was not an inherently “human” condition. The ordinary good of men demands that their private goods be given priority over that of the good of another person and so while slavery may be recognized as a condition which does, in fact, exist, it is neither ideal nor normative; it ought to be avoided and wherever possible the prisoner should be ransomed and the slave manumitted.

Still, there were the claims of authority based upon both nature and the sinful character of a fallen world to be dealt with. It is not simply, as David Brion Davis has observed, “a primary goal of Aquinas to locate functioning points of accommodation between the claims of nature and the restraints of authority.”25 For Thomas, nature itself, even in its prelapsarian state, was radically inequalitarian.

The chief thrust of Christian theology may have been equalitarian but the distance between man and God was so great that inequalities of status between man and man seemed of little significance in comparison. Moreover, God was no respecter of persons and gave His grace, to be sure, unequally but according to no plan that man could understand. It is true that all mankind is equally subject to God’s will and His law and that all stand under His judgment. Moreover, for His own good reasons God finds more delight in the poor, the dispossessed, the humble and the degraded than He does in the wealthy, the powerful, the great and the proud.

While St. Thomas rejected the Aristotelian notion of slavery arising from the nature of the slave, he did accept as natural the principle of hierarchy and gradation in status. It must strike everyone immediately that the Christian concept of equality seems to be in conflict with received notions of hierarchy and status. With his usual energy St. Thomas sought to resolve this conflict.

In the prelapsarian world according to St. Thomas, Summa Theologica, Q. 96, Art. 4, there would have been some inequality as regards sex, age, justice and knowledge. Disparities of bodily strength and beauty would have existed even though “there would have been no defect or fault either in soul or in body.” Since man is a social being and since social life is dependent upon governance and direction to the achievement of the common good, inequality in the perception of the common good and inequality in direction to the good is a necessary aspect of social life even in the state of innocence.

It is important to recognize that the corporatism of St. Thomas is not absolute; that is to say, the individual does not exist for the sake of society. Rather, the individual can achieve his good only in society. Consequently, the corporatism of St. Thomas is individualist in its emphasis. Nature is everywhere characterized by inequality, an inequality which must be recognized as providential and not simply a consequence of sin. The conflict between the most radical inequality of slavery, an inequality which St. Thomas argued did not exist in unfallen nature, and lesser inequalities is not as great as it might at first seem.

Nor did St.Thomas ignore or reject the traditional Christian teachings concerning the relationship of temporal inequalities to the fundamental equality of all men in the sight of God. As long as Christianity was totally transcendent; as long as it represented a movement outside the civil leadership of society, this problem did not emerge as one of major importance. Men simply took the Gospel command of Jesus to rend unto Caesar those things which are Caesar’s and unto God those things which are God’s on its face and drew a line of separation between the civil and the transcendent. In the one society the theory, and to some extent the practice, of equality was dominant; in the other status and power ruled. St. Paul had argued that the institutions of the state, based as they were upon inequalities of status and power had been providential gifts from a good God who sought to preserve mankind from the fatal consequences of sin. Sin would have quite literally brought about the war of all against all had not God given rule and power to some men. Nor did St. Paul make goodness and justice the test of rightness and fitness to rule. One must recall that St. Paul, as had Jesus before him, recommended obedience to the Roman state, the very state which was to execute both Jesus and Paul.

By the fourth century Christianity had become as concerned with this world as it was with the transcendent. When Christianity triumphed over paganism and became the official religion of the Roman Empire it was necessary to invent a reconciling theory which would cover the relationship between temporal realities and transcendent religion. The civil theory of the late Roman Empire was Stoic. Christian patristic social theory in the same period was heavily influenced by Stoic conceptions of the natural law. However, both theoretical realms were filled with contradiction and conflict. The existing order of force, violence and power in the state was in marked contrast to humane theoretical conceptions based upon the Stoic ideal of the natural law. Christian society was no less permeated with sin and folly in spite of the fact that the sources of Christian life were the injunctions of the Gospel. The conflict could be resolved and the temporal and transcendent reconciled only through the recognition of the impact of original sin. The Church fathers argued that:

All social institutions which, from their point of view, were intolerable were due to Original Sin; the patriarchal dominion of the male, private property, slavery, and finally the State which constitutes the essence of the whole—all due to sin. . . .26

Seen in this light hierarchy, differential status, inequality, slavery, great wealth and the employment of force were all capable of being reconciled to the Christian ideal even though the secular and the sacred were no longer strictly separated and divorced. It was a theory, as we have seen, heavily pessimistic in its implications and in marked accord with the apocalyptic expectations of the eleventh century. It envisioned a social order which, in God’s good time, would be swept away and a new heaven and a new earth would stand in its place.

It was the work of St. Thomas to soften and mitigate, to transform and dilute, this teaching. After Thomas, there could be no excuse for pessimism, no excuse for political quietism, no apology for the existence of absolute evil in the society. Thomas accepted the reality of the consequences of sin for the civil order, but he also insisted on the rational participation of the individual in the work of creating a functioning civil order. Political subordination and hierarchy were not the consequences of slavery due to sin. “At first sight this may seem rather tame. . . . From closer reading of the texts, however, it is clear that the subordination to the common good did not spell subservience to a group but personal and responsible sharing in social purposes and decisions.”27

Political authority is not simply a remedy for sin, it is an inherent aspect of man’s social nature. This authority is not authority derived from the Church and legitimated through a sacramental sign but issues, rather, from the necessities of things. Pagan monarchs are no less legitimate than Christian kings. Lordship would have existed in a state of innocence. Man finds the fulfillment of his nature in political participation. “It is . . . evident that the principles St. Thomas was setting out were really contradictory to the Stoic and Patristic tradition which till this time dominated the Middle Ages.”28

It has been argued that while equality and individualism are not the same thing, the achievement of individualism is a sine qua non for the development of the idea of equality. It is a mistake, however, to think of St. Thomas as a precursor of twentieth-century individualism. The theory of St. Thomas was a theory of “personalism” rather than individualism. It is the unique personality which is the creation of God. It is the person who is redeemed through Christ’s suffering and death. It is the person who is the end of society rather than simply a cell in the corporate body.

While it may seem that “personalism” and “individualism” are really the same thing, nearly half a millennium of intellectual development stands between the two terms. It is important to point out that this Thomist-Aristotelean individualism is not based on a theory of natural rights and certainly was not a kind of concealed democratic politics. It was true that Thomas believed that popular assent was the source of legitimate political power but the theory of Thomas is, in spite of this fad, as anti-democratic as a political theory as any the world has known. Far from individual participation in the life of the civis being based on a natural right, it is the consequence of the unequally distributed gifts of nature. Inequality is the single most important key to the political and social theory of St. Thomas and inequality remained the basis of political theory until the end of the eighteenth century. What one is and what one does in society is wholly dependent upon the gifts with which nature and God have endowed the person. The highest political virtue, consequently, is obedience. No man is above obedience, for even kings are subject to obedience to the law.

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Notes

  1. “Hierarchy and Order” by Constantinos A. Patrides in Dictionary of the History of Ideas, Vol. II (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973), 434–49.
  2. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966).
  3. Georges Duby, The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined, translated by Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 57.
  4. Georges Dumézil, The Destiny of a King, translated by Alf Hiltebeitel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973); Georges Dumézil, Gods of the Ancient Northmen, edited by Einar Haugen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973); Georges Dumézil, Mythe et Epopées, 3 vols. (Paris: 1968–73); Myth in Indo-European Antiquity, edited by Gerald J. Larson, co-edited by C. Scott Littleton and Jaan Puhvel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974).
  5. Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1957).
  6. C. Scott Littleton, “Introduction, Part I, Georges Dumezil, Gods of the Ancient Northmen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), xvii.
  7. Georges Duby, The Three Orders, 81.
  8. Henri Focillon, The Year 1000 (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1969).
  9. Georges Duby, The Knight, The Lady and the Priest: The Making of Modern Marriage in Medieval France, translated by Barbara Bray (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983).
  10. Georges Duby, The Chivalrous Society, translated by Cynthia Postan (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1980), and Georges Duby, The Three Orders.
  11. Joseph B. Strayer and Rushton Coulborn, “The Idea of Feudalism” in Feudalism in History, edited by Rushton Coulborn (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1956).
  12. F. L. Granshof, Feudalism, translated by Philip Grierson, second English edition (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1961).
  13. Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, An Essay, translation by S. G. C. Middlemore (London: Phaidon Publishers, 1950), 81.
  14. Colin Morris, The Discovery of the Individual: 1050–1200 (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), and Walter Ullmann, The Individual and Society in the Middle Ages (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1966).
  15. Walter Ullmann, A History of Political Thought: The Middle Ages (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1965), 12.
  16. Walter Ullmann, The Individual and Society, 14.
  17. Ibid., 55–56.
  18. Ibid., 57.
  19. Ibid., 85.
  20. Ibid., 123.
  21. Etienne Gilson, Reason and Revelation in the Middle Ages (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1938).
  22. Aquinas, Selected Political Writings, edited with an introduction by A. P. D’Entreves, translated by J. G. Dawson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1948), x–xi.
  23. David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966).
  24. The Basic Writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, edited and annotated with an introduction by Anton C. Pegis (New York: Random House, 1945), 921–22. I have slightly amended this translation.
  25. David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery, 104.
  26. Ernst Troeltsch, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, Vol. I, translated by Olive Wyon (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960), 153.
  27. Thomas Gilby, The Political Thought of Thomas Aquinas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 154.
  28. Robert W. Carlyle, A History of Medieval Political Theory in the West, Vol. V. The Political Theory of the Thirteenth Century (Edinburgh: William Blackwood & Sons, 1928), 12.